Another month gone buy, but only a bit of the changes in the shop have been completed. I had classes to teach and a project at work coming up on release, so I didn’t spend as much time cleaning up downstairs – yep the rec room is still way overloaded 🙂
Monthly Archives: March 2015
Servo upgrade and replace
New tool in the shop
I recently found a solution for use of the plane stop on my Nicholson workbench. Since the plane stop is a 3×3″ block of maple that just protrudes above the surface, I can basically hold a piece of wood against the stop, and plane directly into the stop. All the pressure (like with bench dogs on my Roubo, etc.) holds the wood in place. What I found was that if I used the doe foot to brace a piece of wood against the wooden plane stop, the width is too wide to help trap that end in place. So, after several months of looking around, and reading Chris S. I found that the next part I wanted to try was a metal edge that would mount flush to the top of the stop, and just protrued a few teeth forward to brace the wood when working it with the does foot. Now keep in mind, that when I use the does foot, I’m really using it to help with traverse planing activity. This pushes across the grain, and is what allowed the stop end to slip a bit. I just received an insert that I picked up on eBay, so I’ve not yet tried it. I will be drilling a vertical hole in the top of one end of the stop (it’s a 5/8″ diameter post) to try this out. Really looking forward to this working and me not having to try to buy and shape a piece of steel!
Pen Decorator – Updating the carriage
After a couple weeks of working on the lathe, there seemed to be too much variance in the carriage. Running it back and forth could introduce some change to the cut, some of which was because the bearing shifted a bit on the rod, and some was because the wooden layers would shift as the wear and vibration built up. As a result, Lee took some time to redesign the carriage to use a wider carriage. This created a longer base that would hopefully have less variance.
Been a busy couple weeks…
Work required some travel recently, so I had a limited shop time available. Plus since the “Day Job” has been pretty busy recently time in the shop has been kind of limited. There are 2 primary changes that I need to update, the first is the progress on the sharpening station. The second is the that the pen decorator has been undergoing some additional changes based on a bunch of experimentation Lee has done. We’ve ordered 400 step stepper motors, to replace the 200’s and give finer control over the cutter movement. We also replaced the mechanism that raises the platform with a stepper.
The sharpening station is nearly complete now. I will be updating the pen decorator section soon!